Thursday 25 April 2013 17.19 EDT
First published on Thursday 25 April 2013 17.19 EDT

Since the arrival of touchscreen tablets, our opposable thumbs have evolved to a whole new level of refinement. It has become second nature to pinch and swipe, slide and scroll: without knowing it, we have developed an intricate vocabulary of manual flourishes, a delicate finger ballet to conjure images and text across our screens.

And yet the process of typing words on a touchscreen still remains unbearably clumsy. Whether you put the thing down and pretend it's a normal keyboard, or go for the handheld thumbs-only option, it is never a particularly elegant or satisfactory pursuit, like having a game of thumb war with your imaginary digital friend.

But now help may be at hand for those tired of getting their thumbs in a twist. Researchers at the University of St Andrews have developed a split-screen keyboard, specifically optimised for thumbs, which they claim can increase typing speeds by more than a third.

They call their new keyboard Kalq (those are the letters at the bottom right of the keyboard), and its layout is a radical departure from the qwerty system, which has been with us unchanged for 140 years. Designed to save your thumbs stretching across the screen and making repeated taps, Kalq splits the keys into two blocks, 16 to the left, 12 to the right. Commonly used letters are clustered together and frequent pairs of letters placed on alternate sides, so each hand does the same amount of work.

Until now, we have been "trapped" with a legacy of "suboptimal text entry interfaces," according to Dr Per Ola Kristensson of the University of St Andrews' School of Computer Science. To break free of the typing tyranny of Qwerty, the research team studied in detail how users move their thumbs in order to develop the optimised layout. With the Kalq system, the left thumb takes care of the most common first letters of words, while the right thumb looks after the vowels – an arrangement that can be reversed for left-handed users.

"The key to optimising a keyboard for two thumbs is to minimise long typing sequences that only involve a single thumb," said Dr Antti Oulasvirta of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany, who collaborated on the research. "Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: while one is typing, the other is approaching its next target. We derived a predictive model of this behaviour for the optimisation method."

So what difference does it actually make? Their tests show that after only 10 hours of training, users were able to reach 37 words a minute, compared with the average of 20 words a minute on a qwerty device.

A keyboard with the qwerty layout, which was first developed in the 1870s. Photograph: Artstock/Alamy

It is something of a miracle that the qwerty layout has persisted for so long, given that it was invented for a mechanical device with the specific intention of slowing typing speeds down. First developed in the 1870s by Milwaukee newspaper editor Christopher Sholes, it was designed to prevent the metal arms of typewriter letters from clashing and jamming the machine as they flew at ferocious speed towards the page. Sholes placed the most frequently used letters as far apart as possible to avoid such jams, making the typist's fingers do the hard work instead.

The typewriter's mechanism of levers beneath each key also dictated that the letters be staggered diagonally across the keyboard, rather than arranged in a rectilinear grid, to prevent the levers from running into one another.

Qwerty was the product of a series of purely mechanical considerations, yet it has endured until today and been unquestioningly translated into the touchscreen realm – where there is little chance of hidden digital levers bumping into each other beneath the display.

It is perhaps the ultimate triumph of accidental skeuomorphic design – when new objects or graphics ape the original functional image of what they are replicating. Electric kettles continue to look like the stove-top variety long after they have needed to go anywhere near a flame, while we are increasingly surrounded by digital skeuomorphs. From the stitched leather borders and ruled yellow legal paper of the iPad's Notes app, to the retro Braun-inspired design of most phone calculators, there is an ease and friendliness that comes with familiarity. There is also a reluctance to relearn tasks that have become programed into our muscle-memory: once touch-typing on a qwerty keyboard has become second nature, why change?

Many have tried, and mostly failed, to challenge the qwerty supremacy in the past – from Dr Dvorak in the 1930s, with his claims of reducing finger distance, to the more recent Colemak system. Will Kalq finally have what it takes to revolutionise typing in our increasingly thumbs-only world?

• This article was amended on 25 April 2013. In the original, "Kalq" was misspelt in the final paragraph. This has been corrected